“What did you learn today?” As a child, I can recall sitting around the dinner table with my siblings hearing these words flow out of my mother and father’s lips in an almost ritualistic manner. I was almost guaranteed to lethargically grunt, “I don’t know” with a blank stare at the nights vegetables trapped between the prongs of my fork. Still, by the end of the meal, my parents always seemed to manage prying something out of me. Some small, meaningless fact that would appease them and put an end to what I considered to be a nightly interrogation. Be it a fact about history, a vocabulary word, a new friend’s name, something, anything…. I hated it back then, but thankfully, my parents impressed upon me the idea that I really do learn something every day.
Design studio Young, based out of Manchester England, has taken the concept my parents were so fond of to heart through the popular Web site: LearnSomethingEveryday. I was recently able to get in touch with Peter Jarvis who is one of the creative directors at the design firm. Peter explained to me that he and his partner Gethin Vaughan conceived the brilliant idea for LearnSomethingEverday while enjoying a drink at a pub. He told me, “[we wanted] a project we could do everyday, something fun.”
The Web site, which began on August 1st, features a simple, yet lesser known fact every day. These facts are scribed on 416 by 640 color pixel rectangles with a clever little illustration done mostly by Peter himself. The background colors for each piece as Peter mentioned to me, do not have any particular pattern rather they are decided upon by the context of the saying. “It’s often what works best with the picture, in a case of a pig flying in the sky, it will be blue or an apple picture would be green [...].”
Interestingly, Peter explained, they try to only use factual statements, but as he admitted, “some sneak through that we haven’t researched properly.” hmm… can you pick them out?
So how can you get your favorite fact on LearnSomethingEveryDay? Simply send an email with your lesser known fact to fact@learnsomethingeveryday.co.uk. Take care to make sure it is original, interesting and appropriate because as Peter shared with me, “we have loads of facts sent everyday which we read, sometimes these are fairly bazarre and sometimes they are completely banal….and some are unbelievable.” The best part about contributing something you know is, “the best fact will be made into a super special poster at the beginning of each month, with the winner getting a free poster” (example below).
As for the long term hope and goals for the site, it appears the brilliant duo, Peter and Gethin, are just taking one day at a time. In fact, Peter conveyed, “we never imagined anything would come from this project but since we started we’ve had to do radio interviews about it, and a couple of publishers have got in touch, so there might very well be a book in the future.” Pretty neat! I wouldn’t be surprised if volume one of Learn Something Every Day was in Urban Outfitters one day.
p.s. If you have the awesome urge to get your fact on the Web site, Peter mentioned that they get the fact, “‘an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain’ [...] about once every two days.” So I would suggest shying away from that one as they obviously have that more widely know fact in excess.
[source via my email with Peter Jarvis / LearnSomethingEveryday]
thanks for passing that along! we’ll see if we figure out what’s going so we can fix the problem.
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